Synchromism (painting)

Synchromism is considered to be the earliest American abstract movement in art. It is also the first American avant-garde movement to have received international recognition. Its founding members were Morgan Russell and Stanton MacDonald-Wright, who developed this mode of painting during the second decade of the twentieth century. The term "Synchromism" was their invention and with it they intended to form an analogy with "Symphony," as their goal was to translate music into visual form through harmonious combinations of color and shapes. Though some synchromist paintings include figurative elements, most are nonrepresentational and often feature a central vortex from which abstract forms rendered in brilliant colors emerge.

Brief History

Stanton McDonald-Wright was born in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 1890 to a well-to-do businessman and amateur painter who ensured that his son receive private art training from an early age. In 1900, the family moved to Santa Monica, California, where, after being expelled from several schools, Wright finally landed at the Art Students League in Los Angeles in 1904. In 1907, he went to Paris and there he immersed himself in the avant-garde art scene. Morgan Russell was born in New York City in 1886. His father died when he was nine and his mother also died four years later. Russell seemingly had a tumultuous relationship with his mother, who perhaps had forced him to dress in girl’s clothing. As an adult, Russell in fact was known to have been a cross-dresser and at times depicted himself as such in his paintings. Russell studied at the New York Art Students League, where in 1906 he met his future benefactor, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. She financed his trip to Paris and Rome in 1906, where he became captivated by the art of Michelangelo whose sculptures he would reference in his own works. Russell returned to New York in 1907 and at the Art Students League he studied with Robert Henri. By 1909 he was back in Paris where he met Wright in 1911. Both men attended the salons hosted by Gertrude and Leo Stein that were also frequented by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Auguste Rodin, and Robert and Sonia Delaunay, among other artists and literati.

The synchromist movement was officially launched in 1913 when Russell exhibited his Synchromy in Green (now lost) at the Paris Salon des Independants. This was followed by an exhibition in Der Neue Kunstsalon in Munich in that same year, featuring mainly the works of Russell and Wright. The exhibition then traveled to the Bernheim-Jeune Gallery in Paris (1913), and finally to the Carroll Galleries in New York in 1914. In writings accompanying the exhibits, the two artists compared themselves to Leonardo da Vinci and they denigrated the works of the impressionists, Cezanne, the cubists, and the futurists. In 1915, Wright’s brother, Willard Huntington Wright, penned a book titled Modern Painting: Its Tendency and Meaning in which he surveyed the most salient modern art movements, placing synchromism at the apex of the modernist evolution.

Overview

Though the synchromists claimed to have created an art that was completely original, the similarities between their compositions and those of the orphists Robert and Sonia Delaunay and Frank Kupka suggest that orphism was one of their sources of inspiration. Orphism was a spin-off of cubism in which color and form were considered to be the primordial elements of painting. Russell and Wright, however, denied the connection and proclaimed their originality by issuing a manifesto in 1913 stating that to compare them to the orphists was to "take a tiger for a zebra, on the pretext that both have a striped skin." Another possible source may have been the work of Wassily Kandinsky who at that time was associating his painted abstractions with music and discussing this new approach in his Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1912). Also, as art students in Paris, one of Russell’s and Wright’s teacher was the Canadian painter Ernest Percyval Tudor-Hart, who believed in correspondences between music and color and who associated the twelve hues of the spectrum to the twelve tones of the musical octave—notions that became the foundation for synchromism.

It was Russell who coined the term "synchromism" in 1912 to express the link between painting and music in the art he and Wright were creating. Their main premise was that paintings can be orchestrated in the same way as music by utilizing color scales and chords to render visual harmonies and invoke in the viewer comparable reactions to the experience of listening to concordant musical compositions. They gave their works appellations such as Cosmic Synchromy (by Russell; 1913–1914, Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute), Synchromie en bleu-violacé (by Russell; 1913, Minneapolis Regis Collection,), and Oriental Synchromy in Blue and Green (by Wright; 1918, New York, Whitney Museum of American Art).

Perhaps due to the heated rhetoric Russell and Wright utilized, their arrogance at claiming their superiority among the modernists, and the fact that they were attacking French masters in their own country, the synchromist movement was short-lived. Wright returned to New York in 1915 and, together with his brother he helped organize the Forum Exhibition at the Anderson Galleries, which included the works of Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove, John Marin, and the Synchromists. In 1918, he returned to Santa Monica and continued painting synchromies that now often included figurative elements. He also engaged in art teaching, dying in California in 1973. Russell remained in Paris until 1946, where he continued to paint. He eventually gave up synchromism in favor of figurative religious paintings. He returned to New York after leaving Paris and died there in 1953.

Unfortunately, only recently has synchromism become of interest to art critics and scholars. In 1978, the Whitney Museum organized an exhibition titled Synchromism and American Color Abstraction, 1910–1925, with an accompanying catalogue authored by Gail Levin. It was not until 1990 that a second exhibition took place. This was a retrospective of Morgan Russell’s works at the Montclair Museum of Art, the catalogue penned by Marilyn Kushner. Eleven years passed before a third exhibition was arranged, now at the North Carolina Museum of Art, with Will South providing the corresponding catalogue. Yet, though synchromism was short-lived and interest in it among critics and scholars is limited, the movement was ultimately central to the evolution of modern American art. In fact, a number of American artists, among them Thomas Hart Benton, Patrick Henry Bruce, Albert Henry Krehbiel, Arthur B. Davis, and Andrew Dasburg experimented with synchromism at some point in their artistic careers.

Bibliography

Agee, William C. Synchromism and Color Principles in American Painting, 1910–1930. New York: Knoedler, 1965. Print.

Dorman, John, "Symphonies in Color." Art and Antiques Magazine (2010). Print.

Kushner, Marilyn. Morgan Russell. New York: Hudson Hills, 1990. Print.

Levin, Gail. Synchromism and American Color Abstraction, 1910–1925. New York: Braziller, 1978. Print.

Riley, Charles A. Color Codes: Modern Theories of Color in Philosophy, Painting and Architecture, Literature, Music, and Psychology. Lebanon: UP of New England, 1995. Print.

South, Will. Color, Myth, and Music: Stanton MacDonald-Wright and Synchromism. Raleigh: North Carolina Museum of Art, 2001. Print.

Hollis-Taggart Galleries. Synchromism: Morgan Russell and Stanton MacDonald-Wright. New York: Hollis-Taggart Galleries, 1999. Print.